I’ve always known that a book was needed to accumulate all the funny things I’ve experienced over the years working with great people and tasting great foods. I met my co-author Mike Edison while doing a show on the Heritage Radio Network, and I knew I had found a perfect communicator for these ideas.
The way you cut your meat reflects the way you live. — Confucius Of an average eight-hundred-pound steer on the rail, I’ve seen between 20 and 80 percent turned into ground. It’s very simple: The more meat that is ground, the fewer pieces the farmer needs to worry about selling.
Every year for the past decade the Heritage Foods USA crew takes a bunch of chefs on a tour of the slaughter facility and farms that we work with in Kansas. What is most remarkable about the experience each time is witnessing the crossing of cultures: chefs mostly from the coasts who work at some of the best restaurants in the country meet, greet and share a meal and drinks with farmers and processors from the Midwest who raise the best meats in the country on their farms.
But more young people are signing on to this line of work than in past decades because of a growing demand for better food. Perhaps no other two organizations have done more to support this important trend than 4-H Youth Development Organization and FFA (Future Farmers of America).
What really separates Heritage Breeds of chicken from the rest of the pack, and why is it so important to help preserve breed diversity? What is most remarkable about the chicken is that every one of the approximately 12 billion that populate the planet earth are all descended from the Red junglefowl (gallus gallus) of southern Asia.
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